Android leap-frogged Symbian to take top spot in the final quarter of 2010, taking 32 percent of the market in those three months, showing incredible growth of 615 percent quarter-on-quarter compared to 2009. Figures from analysts Gartner released today show that Googleâ€™s smartphone platform will continue to grow, capturing 38.5 percent of the market by the end of 2011 and a whopping 49.2 percent by 2012. Interestingly the figures show that the 2012 figure could be a peak for Android as by the time 2015 rolls around Gartner is predicting the platform will hold â€˜onlyâ€™ 48.8 percent.
So who will be losing out to give Android this share? Well, in what will be a sad sight for Symbian lovers, by the time we hit 2015, Symbian will be all but a distant memory, with a few die-hards holding on to the last few handsets running Nokiaâ€™s platform - indeed, the platformâ€™s share of the market will be halved by the end of this year. The biggest winner will be Microsoftâ€™s Windows Phone platform shooting up from 5 percent of the market currently to almost 20 percent in 2015 â€“ making it the second most popular platform. These figures seem to be based a lot on its partnership with Nokia being a success. RIM will also lose out, dropping from 16 percent of the market this year to just 11 percent by 2015 despite its expected migration from BlackBerry OS to the more advanced QNX next year.

Appleâ€™s iOS popularity will peak this year at 19 percent but will continue to hold a respectable market share considering it has only one model on sale compared to the huge array of Android smartphones currently available. Total smartphone sales will be almost 470 million this year rising to over a billion units in 2015. While the figures from Gartner cannot be taken with any certainty, fellow analysts IDC last week made very similar predictions about Androidâ€™s future success.